Contumacious
Radical Freedom
Never Forget: Conservatives Invented Obamacare. Where They Want to Take Us Next Should Scare You Even More
By Dale Steinreich
This week Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act, or ACA) enrollment begins. Briefly, how did we get here?
The core of Obamacare, the requirement that individuals purchase health insurance, traces back to Stuart Butler at the conservative Heritage Foundation in the late 1980s. This can be seen in a 1989 Heritage monograph (p. 51). Ezra Klein points to University of Pennsylvania economics professor and conservative Mark Pauly as the father of the individual mandate based on Paulys co-authored 1991 Health Affairs paper (p. 8, item 3) supporting the idea.
Two years after Paulys paper, and using the same argument Pauly made about mandatory auto insurance, conservative Republican Newt Gingrich appeared on NBCs Meet the Press enthusiastically supporting the mandate. (Gingrich re-endorsed the mandate on the same program on May 15, 2011, then recanted the next day after a firestorm of criticism and ridicule.)
A Republican governor, Mitt Romney, signed the mandate into law in Massachusetts in April of 2006. Barack Obama, as a presidential primary candidate in 2008, firmly opposed the mandate but as president signed it into U.S. law on March 23, 2010.
In danger of being overturned, in June of 2012 conservative Republican Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, came to the mandates rescue, providing the critical fifth vote to the courts progressive judges in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius to cement the mandate in place as supposedly constitutional statute."
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By Dale Steinreich
This week Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act, or ACA) enrollment begins. Briefly, how did we get here?
The core of Obamacare, the requirement that individuals purchase health insurance, traces back to Stuart Butler at the conservative Heritage Foundation in the late 1980s. This can be seen in a 1989 Heritage monograph (p. 51). Ezra Klein points to University of Pennsylvania economics professor and conservative Mark Pauly as the father of the individual mandate based on Paulys co-authored 1991 Health Affairs paper (p. 8, item 3) supporting the idea.
Two years after Paulys paper, and using the same argument Pauly made about mandatory auto insurance, conservative Republican Newt Gingrich appeared on NBCs Meet the Press enthusiastically supporting the mandate. (Gingrich re-endorsed the mandate on the same program on May 15, 2011, then recanted the next day after a firestorm of criticism and ridicule.)
A Republican governor, Mitt Romney, signed the mandate into law in Massachusetts in April of 2006. Barack Obama, as a presidential primary candidate in 2008, firmly opposed the mandate but as president signed it into U.S. law on March 23, 2010.
In danger of being overturned, in June of 2012 conservative Republican Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, came to the mandates rescue, providing the critical fifth vote to the courts progressive judges in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius to cement the mandate in place as supposedly constitutional statute."
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